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Sunday, December 16, 2012

The Final Day: Back to Argonne

After a brief off-site respite, I am back at the Advanced Photon Source once more. I was just about to start running my sample, when the beam cut out. Then I had to reload my sample and restart not once, not twice, but three times. My sample just got started in the past hour. Oh well. The data looks okay-ish now, so hopefully, this keeps up! Right now, I am manually recording the temperature at which each pattern is being taken. I will personally pay for Argonne to automate this process if it means that I do not have to do this again when I come back.

In the time that the beam was down, I trolled around Pinterest for a while. Now, I'm not actually on Pinterest because I know that I would turn into that person who is ALWAYS on Pinterest. But that doesn't mean that I can't troll around on it occasionally. (Revelation: I just realized that Pinterest is a play on "interest." Don't judge. Just because I'm in grad school, that doesn't mean that I can't be slow to get things some times. :P Also, it is 2 or 3 in the morning.) I dug up a bunch of fun recipes, so I'll have plenty of things to blog about in the coming weeks. :)

We have about six more hours of beam time left before we head back to Evanston/Chicago. It's been a good experience, albeit a tiring one. Being here and seeing the capabilities has given me a bunch of ideas on stuff that I want to try. That's the problem with research sometimes....one idea can lead to twenty more (or sometimes, one meeting with your advisor can turn into three months of work).